


The You I See in my Mind is Smiling

by bar2d2s



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: F/M, Kid Fic, M/M, Richie Tozier is a Mess, moving on proves impossible but who wants to be happy anyway, the unfortunately named spawn of Ben and Bev
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 06:30:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21157163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bar2d2s/pseuds/bar2d2s
Summary: TrashmouthTozier: hey twitter why didn’t any of you assholes warn me that the stupid rock princesses show would make me cry harder than my goddaughter did i want a refundTrashmouthTozier: ...okay but also when’s season sixMemory is a tricky thing, literally any random thing can trigger it. Even a kiddie cartoon Richie only watches because his goddaughter loves it so much, honest.





	The You I See in my Mind is Smiling

Bev and Ben had named their poor spawn Eudora, just so they’d be able to call her Eddie. Their own little Eddie, born five weeks early and screaming from the start. Richie thinks her namesake would have approved. 

His home is always open to rambling Losers, so whenever the three of them make it out to Cali, Richie takes the opportunity to spoil his goddaughter rotten. Eddie’s barely three, so what she mostly wants to do with him is eat Cocoa Puffs and watch brightly colored cartoons about rocks and princesses and rock princesses and honestly? He’s fine with that. He’s even kinda getting into the rock princess cartoon. He likes the anal, pointy one, because of course he does.

He’s a casual viewer, though he’s able to suss out pretty easily that the rocks are all lesbians, and that their matriarchal dictatorship outlawed love, so that’s why they left. “Pretty progressive, for a kiddie show.” Richie’d said the first time Bev had caught them watching it together, Eddie in his lap, happily teething on the strap of his watch. She’d just laughed.

“I like the songs. The British chick that sang that one song plays one of the lead roles.” She hummed a portion of a tune, one Richie’s asshole memory immediately picked out as American Boy.

“Bev, why can’t my bullshit memory remember the name of our homeroom teacher in seventh grade, but it can name a song I heard on the radio once ten years ago?” Ben would have made him put a dollar in the swear jar, in his _ own house _ even, but Bev just shrugged.

“Just lucky I guess. Ooh, this is the one with the sad song, move over.”

Richie liked the rock princess cartoon. 

He started to keep up with it regularly, whenever new episodes actually came out, and when the movie was announced, well, he wanted to think that it was a coincidence that he’d be babysitting Eddie on the night of the premiere while her parents went out and did whatever it was they did without him when they came to visit. Tourist shit, probably.

Eddie’s started out a holy terror that day, screeching her little lungs out, throwing her toys around, getting absolutely _ coated _ in mud, then jumping out of the bathtub whenever Richie took his eyes off her for a second. He half considered banning her from television that night and catching a rerun of the movie after she’d gone to bed, but she calmed down shortly after noon and was an angel up through dinner time.

“Steven!” She insisted, dragging him out into the living room. “Wanna see Steven, Richie!” Eddie never called him Uncle Richie, like she did Bill and Mike. It made him feel like he meant less to her for a while, until he’d caught her calling her mother Bev one day, and then he felt more like family than ever.

“Eudora Hanscom, no pulling. Don’t make me get the leash, kiddo.” Eddie made a face.

“_ Rich_ie!” She whined, and he dug his heels into the hardwood floor, sticking out his tongue.

“Eu_dor_a!” Richie whined back, and her little face scrunched up into a barely-concealed smile. They made it to the couch just in time for the opening credits.

Eddie settled into his lap, her favorite spot to watch their show, and Richie snapped a quick picture to send to her parents. “Time for -Sting voice- ROCKS” Bev texted back a laughing emoji, and he shook his head. They were all so fucking _ old _. 

The movie was great. It was definitely a culmination of all the little plot threads that the show had been building all this time, and while he couldn’t follow all of it, Richie was having a lot of fun singing along with Eddie. And then.

“And then she smiled, that’s what I’m after. The smile in her eyes, the sound of her laughter.”

It cut him to the quick; memories of sun-dappled afternoons in a hammock, annoying the person he loved most in the world until he smiled, until Eddie looked upon the absolute buffoonery that were his best friend’s actions and laughed that screechy, girlish giggle of his. Those moments were worth the pain. Those moments were worth the agony that was his dirty little secret. And he would never have a moment like that ever again.

That thought, like a baseball bat on a window, completely broke him.

“Richie?” Eddie asked, looking up at him as he sobbed, face in his hands. “Richie it’s okay. She’s gonna be Steven’s friend now. That’s how the show works.” Three years old and she could already recognize patterns in TV shows, this kid was a goddamn genius.

“I know, Eddie Spaghetti, the song was just really sad.” Eddie made noises at him, ones Richie vaguely recognized as the kind Bev used to make at her crying baby. Soothing sounds. God, he loved this kid.

There was a happy ending, because of course there was, and Eddie made him look up the villain song on YouTube and play it ten times in a row before she settled down enough to actively feel the exhaustion from her long day. Ben and Bev would probably be back within the next hour to give him some much needed adult time, so it was probably time to put the munchkin down for the night.

“You wanna go put on your jammies, Eds?” He asked while Eddie was mid-yawn, and she shook her head. “Okay, but I’m gonna put on mine, so you’re gonna look dumb dressed in your day clothes at night.” That got her.

“I wanna wear my monster dress!” Ben had explained that one. It was her Halloween costume from last year, which they’d repurposed into pajamas because it was easier than trying to force their daughter into clothes she hated. Eddie had been a skeleton. One of the pictures was still his lock screen, months later.

“Sure squirt, lets go get you dead and buried.”

Eddie squealed with glee as he tucked her into the crook of his arm, her arms around his neck (and god, hadn’t he been able to easily hold her in one arm last time she’d visited?), and they went upstairs to change. Once Eddie was laying in the guest room’s bed, teeth brushed and monster dress on, she began to do that same old song and dance.

“Tell me the story about the bad man!”

Richie wasn’t sure which of her parents had let it slip, but Eddie knew. Not about everything, but about Pennywise. About the man she was named after. About how they won.

“A long time ago in the worst town ever, a bad man was stealing children. The adults couldn’t do anything about it, but a group of kids, tired of their friends going missing, decided to hunt him down. They beat him up, and said that if he ever came back, they would too.” Eddie is drifting, not fully asleep, but getting there. “The bad man came back when they were grown, so the group of friends went back to fight him again. This time, they took him down for good. They were all strong and brave, but the strongest and bravest of the friends was named Eddie.” She stirred at the sound of her name, but not by much. “Eddie didn’t make it home after they fought the bad man, so when two of his friends had a kid of their own, they named her after him, because they loved them both that much.”

Eddie is fully asleep now, and Richie has no idea when Bev and Ben had come in, but their arms are around him as he shakes. As he does the thing he swore he’d stop doing. As he cries over the boy who’d outgrown his love 30 years ago, the boy he’d never stopped loving even after he grew into some weird, petite man that married his own fucking mom and brought two suitcases and a hospital on a weekend trip. He cries for the man he never got to know. He cries for the future they could have had if he’d snapped out of the deadlights a split second faster.

_ You’re kidding, right? _ His brain scoffs at him. _ You think Eddie would have been like oh thanks for saving me Richie, let me just leave my wife and we can ride into the sunset together. Maybe we can adopt a beautiful baby girl that looks like a blending of all the best aspects of Ben and Bev, get a house somewhere other than LA. _

“You guys really _ need _ to stop seeing me at my worst, it’s starting to become a thing.” Richie sniffles into Ben’s broad shoulder as Bev pets his hair, making the same noises her daughter had earlier. 

Richie came out in his act around the time Eddie was born. “Two of my best friends just had a baby about a month ago, and they made me her godfather which, frankly, astounds me. We have two other perfectly good friends with healthy coping mechanisms! I have no idea what I’d do with a baby if anything happened to them. Like, I loved this kid from the moment I met her, but I’d absolutely fail at being a parent. Can you imagine, me trying to raise a baby in LA? I can, but in this fantasy, my husband is usually shouldering about 80% of the work and I’m just there to pay for everything.” 

It had been a small club show, a friend cashing in a favor after his headliner overdosed, but he’d still been trending on Twitter less than two hours later. Richie had chosen to shut off his phone, run a bath, and swear to himself that now that the world knew about him, he would move on.

But you can’t really move on from the only man you’ve ever loved dying in your arms, especially when the new love of your life shares his name.

“We think you need to move back east.” Bev said softly, her arms around his waist, chin hooked into his shoulder. Ben leaned forward, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ear, and Richie’s heart panged painfully. “We miss you, Rich. And uh, there’s another reason.” She patted his stomach, and Richie snorted.

“Of course I’m getting fat, Bev, I’m 43 and my diet is mostly potatoes and beer.” There were a few beats of silence as Bev patiently waited for his brain to process what she was trying to say. “Wait. Wait hold the fuck up. Are you-?” Ben grinned, and Richie smashed his palm into his face. “Shut up, you’re not anything, you’re just the gun that fired the bullet. Bev, that’s amazing! I can’t believe you’d get knocked up again so I can steal your firstborn and raise her as my own.”

They had to hold down their laughter, because Eddie was still very much asleep, but then Richie was dragging them both downstairs. “If you’re springing this on me now, you’d better have the Manhattan real estate listings in your suitcase with a bunch of shit near you circled because I can pack up my _ life _ in like two days. Most of this shit came with the house.”

It was true, too. He could fit the majority of the possessions he actually felt like keeping in the backseat and trunk of his car, rent a U-Haul trailer to stuff his overpriced mattress and maybe his favorite deck chair. “Seriously, I’m not touring right now, I could be in New York as soon as next week.”

There was a kind of loneliness about his life that Richie didn’t even realize he felt most of the time. The isolation that came with fame, and all of your closest friends living in another time zone. But this-! The idea of moving back to the east coast, within spitting distance of Derry compared to the sun and sand of California, had always turned his stomach. What reason did he have to go back?

“You guys know I’m just gonna spoil Eddie worse now that I don’t have to put up with the fucking US postal service overcharging me every other week, right?” Ben and Bev were smiling and if he felt his face, Richie would know that he was too. What reason did he have to go back? Same reason he’d gone back last time. Eddie.

And yeah, it was a different Eddie this time around, and he loved her in a completely different way than the original, but still.

“Also, and don’t take this the wrong way, but if you name this kid Staniel or something I will literally chase the birth certificate nurse down the hall and stop her from telling the government your crimes.”

“Beep beep, Richie!”


End file.
